Why Did Sridhar Vembu Really Come to India?
The story you've been sold: A billionaire tech entrepreneur renounces Silicon Valley, returns to a Tamil Nadu village, lives simply, cycles to work, talks about dharma and reversing brain drain. Simple living, high thinking. A saint in a cotton shirt.
The story the California courts tell: He moved to India in late 2019. Filed for divorce in 2021. In between, he transferred ownership of Zoho's US subsidiary to entities controlled by his associate Tony Thomas and his sister Radha Vembu, who now holds an estimated 47.8% stake in the company, without his wife's knowledge or consent.
A California court didn't mince words. It found that Vembu had acted "without regard for respondent's interests in community assets and without regard for the law." It ordered him to post a $1.7 billion bond. Unprecedented, the court itself said.
His wife Pramila Srinivasan, who by her own account supported the household in Zoho's early years and was kept in the dark about the ownership restructuring, is still fighting the case in California. Their son, who has autism and requires lifelong care, lives with her in the Bay Area. He is 26 years old.
Vembu left him behind.
The move to rural India wasn't a philosophical act. It was a jurisdictional one. California's community property law requires marital assets to be split equally in a divorce.
The solution, apparently, was to move the assets and himself out of California's reach before the divorce became formal. The village was the alibi. The dharma was the disguise. This is the conclusion the evidence points to.
The trial is not yet concluded and Vembu has denied all allegations, calling them complete fiction. But the court, looking at the same evidence, found his explanations not credible.
And then came the reward. The Modi government gave him the Padma Shri on January 26, 2021 and appointed him to the National Security Advisory Board just days later, in February 2021.
The formal divorce filing came in August that year. The government honoured him while the marriage was already in ruins and the asset transfers were already underway.
But the courts and the Padma Shri are almost secondary. The real villainy is what he did to millions of ordinary Indians who believed him.
The man built an entire public persona on selflessness, on the idea that he had walked away from wealth and comfort for the sake of rural youth, for India, for something larger than himself. People quoted him. Teachers cited him. Young men from small towns looked up to him.
It was a performance.
Underneath the saint was a man who had abandoned his wife of nearly three decades, walked away from a son who needed him, moved a billion dollar empire out of legal reach, and dressed the whole operation up as enlightenment.
That is the real story of why Sridhar Vembu came to India.
@DcWalaDesi This is kerala in India where every religion is respected unlike the rest of india where minorities are attacked. This Godi media sitting in us doesnt want to show the vandalism happening against churches & minorities in india. Shame !!!
https://t.co/kvnKuB1dYj
Shows abusing Rhea Chakroborty, calling her guilty, demanding her arrest, demanding her execution without any proof :
Arnab : 435
Navika : 345
Smita : 129
Anjana : 122
Shows apologising to her when she has been given clean chit by Modi Govt's CBI :
Arnab : 00
Navika : 00
Smita : 00
Anjana : 00
They destroyed the digjnity of a woman, may Karma catches up to them soon.
America is getting astronauts safely back. Countries are preparing human missions on Mars. China is developing AI. India is busy searching for and trying to dig graves of Mughals. Our nation is being pushed to the verge of destruction enthusiastically aided by Noida channels.
Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct [...] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.” Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful!
In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write code character by character) to keyboards with terminals, programming became easier. And that made it a better time than before to begin programming. Yet it was in this era that Nobel laureate Herb Simon wrote the words quoted in the first paragraph. Today’s arguments not to learn to code continue to echo his comment.
As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer!
Over the past few decades, as programming has moved from assembly language to higher-level languages like C, from desktop to cloud, from raw text editors to IDEs to AI assisted coding where sometimes one barely even looks at the generated code (which some coders recently started to call vibe coding), it is getting easier with each step.
I wrote previously that I see tech-savvy people coordinating AI tools to move toward being 10x professionals — individuals who have 10 times the impact of the average person in their field. I am increasingly convinced that the best way for many people to accomplish this is not to be just consumers of AI applications, but to learn enough coding to use AI-assisted coding tools effectively.
One question I’m asked most often is what someone should do who is worried about job displacement by AI. My answer is: Learn about AI and take control of it, because one of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you. Coding (or getting AI to code for you) is a great way to do that.
When I was working on the course Generative AI for Everyone and needed to generate AI artwork for the background images, I worked with a collaborator who had studied art history and knew the language of art. He prompted Midjourney with terminology based on the historical style, palette, artist inspiration and so on — using the language of art — to get the result he wanted. I didn’t know this language, and my paltry attempts at prompting could not deliver as effective a result.
Similarly, scientists, analysts, marketers, recruiters, and people of a wide range of professions who understand the language of software through their knowledge of coding can tell an LLM or an AI-enabled IDE what they want much more precisely, and get much better results. As these tools are continuing to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do.
[Original text: https://t.co/HdI3Jb9HmF ]
In the run-up to Holi, every channel is debating whether Muslims should step out of their homes or not or go to the masjid for namaz. Every festival is a battleground, every religious practice a test of dominance. The media plays its role perfectly — stoking paranoia instead of coexistence. There’s no sense of festivity or joy in all of this, just how to put the other in their place. Meanwhile, the world is discussing economy, AI, trade, we’re stuck manufacturing communal strife. “Vishwa Guru” but can’t even guarantee peace on a festival.
Have you seen those beautiful pictures and videos of #PMVisitsVantara ?
Every celeb who matters- @imVkohli, @iamsrk and @sachin_rt have been tweeting them.
Now, GO READ THIS. The best piece of investigative work in India in 2024.
By @mrajshekhar
https://t.co/WxvtDGMZ1S #
@sardesairajdeep Rupee collapsing, inflation rising, taxes exploding, unemloyment skyrocketing, corruption is endless, wealth distribution is unbalanced. The system has been rigged to present read only level.
Saugandh mujhe equity ki
Main desh nahi jhukne dunga
Hello, actual microbiome researcher here.
Bacteriophages are giant viruses that feast on various types of bacteria.
The presence of large numbers of bacteriophages is a measure of severe bacterial contamination from various sources including human excreta.
Sewage water contains very large amounts of bacteriophages. It doesn't make it drinkable.
The Government will always find such so-called scientists with a penchant for twisting and misinterpreting scientific data to fit their narrative, instead of making the public more aware, to prevent widespread negative healthcare events.
This is a government of the people, by the people, but definitely not for the people.
Give money in cash, get autopsy done at night and send them with a cop to their home town so that the whole thing can be wished away from the minds of the people. Shameless people running the show, scared of being held accountable for their misdeeds.